'Righteous Trash' Pre-Order and First Chapter!

We're going back to Idaho's gritty underside.

I always liked it when a favorite musician or band dropped a new album without any warning, but that’s not the reason why you’re only hearing about “Righteous Trash” a little over a month before its release date. Truth be told, the past few months have been busy between a new day-job, a sprinting toddler, another book prepping to go on sub… which meant a lot of my usually-rigorous pre-promo got back-burnered.

Anyway! “Righteous Trash” (if you’re a Kindle reader, pre-order here; paperback link soon) is the third book in my Boise trilogy, following “Boise Longpig Hunting Club” and “Rattlesnake Rodeo,” both of which have been re-issued with glorious new covers by Rock and a Hard Place Press. I never intended to write a trilogy-capper, but I had too many ideas to resist taking another wild journey with bounty hunter Jake Halligan and his gun-running sister Frankie. This tale entangles them with rogue FBI agents, another vicious arms dealer, the world’s weirdest shooting contest (just begging to be ripped off), and a whole desert state of miscreants teetering on the edge of chaos. The first chapter is below…

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1.

It was midnight but I was still wide awake in bed when the security lights in the back yard blazed to life. That wasn’t unusual: a stray dog or cat or runaway hog from the neighboring farm set off the sensors on a weekly basis. I lay there blinking, wondering if I should take the opportunity to get up and piss, maybe pop a painkiller to quiet the faint ache in my legs and ribs. My old war wounds liked to speak up whenever I went horizontal for too long, but that was okay—at my age, those scars and fractures were more like old friends than ghosts.

A few seconds later came the muffled rasp of metal from outside, and sad to say, that wasn’t unusual, either: every so often, a meth head or other freak would lurk at the edges of the property, trying to find anything to steal or snort. I rolled from beneath the covers. On the far side of the bed, my wife Janine grunted softly and stirred, and I placed a comforting hand on her hip before slipping into the hallway.

Downstairs, I unlocked my gun safe and pulled a Glock 19 from my collection. In the past few years, Janine and I had survived a home invasion and a kidnapping, which had only solidified my desire to keep buying guns. If I wanted, I could have taken the AR-15 or the Benelli M3 or even the grenade Frankie had gifted me one Christmas, but I wanted to evaluate any threats before I turned my property into World War III. I’d feel bad if I vaporized a cat.

I opened the back door a crack and paused to listen to the night. The security lights had clicked off, plunging the world into darkness again. As my eyes adjusted, I scanned for any movement in the little boneyard I’d started beyond the ditch that marked the back yard’s rear edge. So far, it was stocked with three of my family’s rustiest junkers, including the Toyota Camry I’d driven in high school and my dad’s ancient Bronco. It wasn’t out of the question that a desperate thief, having spied the cars from the road, was doing his best to saw out the catalytic converters.

I slipped through the doorway onto our porch, angling toward the steps that led to the driveway. From there, I planned on flanking the boneyard, placing me behind anyone lurking there. I had the Glock in a two-handed grip, my trigger finger resting along the slide, and I could sight and fire in a fraction of a second if someone was stupid enough to try anything. It might be a dumb teenager looking to score a few bucks in auto parts, but teenagers carried guns—

A voice from the black: “Bro. Chill out.”

I paused, my pistol wavering. Confusion and excitement and fear all collided in my head like a set of out-of-control trucks in a snowstorm. “Frankie?” I called.

“You have any other sisters I don’t know about?” That metallic scraping again, followed by the security lights flaring bright. Frankie stood in the dry weeds beyond the Camry, a short shovel in her left hand. She was dressed in a short-sleeved black shirt and a pair of dirt-smeared shorts, a silver pistol in a holster on her left hip.

“The hell,” I said, lowering my weapon. After taking a bullet to the side a few years ago, Frankie had opted for self-exile in Mexico. The last I’d heard, she had a small house outside of Veracruz, where she ran freelance security for some local cigar factories and liquor distilleries. She also refused to let me visit, which offended me for a few months until I realized she needed time to soothe her enormous ego: the infamous Frankie Halligan, the most feared and whispered-about gunrunner west of the Mississippi, brought low by a .22-caliber bullet fired by a rich prick.

I’d spent all these years wanting to tell her it was okay, some of the bravest and most skilled men I’d ever known were killed by IEDs or 12-year-olds who squeezed off a lucky shot. No matter how good you are, your luck always runs out. But she wasn’t the kind of person who’d absorb that lesson with grace.

Frankie stabbed the shovel into the earth beside her. “Sorry, I would have called, but you know how it goes,” she said, and shrugged. “Operational security and all that.”

“Did you put another bucket in my yard?” I asked, crossing the yard toward her. In her old life, Frankie had a habit of filling buckets and waterproof boxes with supplies and burying them across Idaho. One of those caches had saved our lives in the not-so-distant past, but I’d warned her about planting weapons anywhere close to where my kid played.

“Technically, it’s not in your yard, more like your junk pile,” she said. “Second, I’d have been a lot quieter if you hadn’t parked this old hunk of shit right on top of it.”

“How many?” I asked.

She sighed. “That one we dug up back in the day, remember, with the false IDs in it? Then this one. Then another on the other side of the driveway, which isn’t even your property, I don’t think.”

“What’s in this one?”

“You know, it’s nice to see you, too. It’s been too long.”

I paused on the far side of the Camry, studying her in the fierce burn of the security lights. She had lost weight, her cheekbones sharp and shadowy, but that wasn’t the worst part: her eyes were black holes, like her face was a mask and I could see the night through it. Something inside her was missing. It broke my heart.

The back door of the house opened, framing Janine in silhouette. “What’s going on?” she called.

“Hey,” Frankie said, waving to her. “Just digging shit up in the dead of night.”

From across the yard, I could sense Janine’s irritation baking off her like heat. Frankie had always churned up the waters of our marriage: Janine understood I couldn’t abandon family, but she didn’t like the idea of family selling guns and shooting people—and she’d never wavered on that point, even when Frankie saved her life a few times.

“We’re happy to see you,” I told Frankie, and meant it. Ever since she’d left, I’d startled a little whenever my phone buzzed or the doorbell rang, expecting bad news from down south.

“What brings you around?” Janine called, as casual as if Frankie had driven up to the house on a typical Friday night.

“I decided to open a new chapter in my life,” Frankie said. “Should we be talking quieter? I don’t want to wake up my darling niece.”

“She’s with my parents,” Janine said. “Coming back in a week.”

“Too bad.” Frankie shrugged. “But maybe for the best. I know it’s confusing, me showing up like this. Thank you for the hospitality.”

Janine shrugged. “Sure.” Then she turned and went inside, slamming the door behind her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She just doesn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night.”

“Who does?” Frankie pried the shovel loose and rammed it into the earth again. “You asked what was in here. For starters, a bit of cash wrapped in plastic, along with a couple of phones that are probably dead. I need that cash to make a lot more cash.”

“Why?” For a stupid moment, I thought she might mention credit card debt or a mortgage, the same everyday things that had snared me, but that wasn’t Frankie.

“Because I’m staging a comeback,” she said. “Gonna be bigger than ever. And while we’re at it, we got some past sins to wash away, too. You’ll love it.”

I’d never admit this to Janine, but I’d always rooted for my sister, even when she was leaving heads in duffel bags. There was just one thing that bothered me. “What past sins?” I asked.

“Too complicated to explain late at night with a shovel in my hand,” she said. “But trust me, you’ll be involved.”

“Are we killing people?”

“Only if they decide to be assholes.” She offered me a wolf’s smile. “In the meantime, we have some money to earn. I’m going to win Crazy Bill’s Shooting Contest.”